Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Although agenda-setting research is one of the most widely investigated theories in mass communication, it is still not clear whether newspapers or television are more powerful in terms of salience transfer from the media to the public. In addition, most agenda-setting studies are content- rather than attention-based, and use cross-sectional rather than panel data. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this study is to compare the predictive power of overall political news consumption, as well as media-specific news consumption, on perceived issue salience across different media channels and media types in the context of the 2006 Swedish parliamentary election. Findings suggest that overall consumption of political news is significantly more important than consumption of specific media outlets in predicting changes in issue salience, though there are exceptions. Although the study demonstrates that the Swedish news media collectively can exert considerable agenda-setting influence over their audiences, it could however not find any consistent evidence of differences related to media channels or media types. The reasons for and implications of the results are discussed